of all shades and hues, but especially the groups and individuals opposed to the
abstractions of racial superiority legitimated through practices of segregation, created a
multiplicity of cultures of opposition literature. This culture was entrenched both in the
distant past, and from the late 1950s to the period of the collapse of apartheid. Not being
an agitation to be rewarded on a platter of gold, the brutality and suppression that was the
reaction of the establishment to this literature produced, perhaps in the most unique
manner, what Mazisi Kunene (1996:16) refers to as “fighting literature”. This was
exhibited in the main opposition cadres of the ANC, but also significantly linked to the
more widely accessible literature of writers whose concern was “creating a significant
critique of apartheid in order to mobilise the intellectuals”. The production of this
literature of resistance alongside other cultures of resistance explains why today it is
impossible to undertake an assessment of South African literature without recourse to the
admittance of the centrality of exile to the question of definition of its literary history.
This is because “in no other country, save perhaps 1930s Germany, did the state mount
such a concerted effort to expel and destroy the most innovative representatives of non-
official culture” (David Bunn (1996: 33). In other words, while literature of this category
of resistance evolved to “mobilize” an intellectual response to the social injustice
authorized by the state, most of the literary figures white and black whose art fell into
this category, found themselves at one time or the other forced out of the country.
But to limit the mass and forced movement of people from South Africa during apartheid
to the category of resistance writers is to gloss over the fact that such writers were only
representative of the great number of victims of exile whose status was also connected,
one way or the other, to the fact of state repression. What the opposition in the broad
sense of the word experienced, both in terms of severance from home and the travails of
exile, became so overwhelming that it could not be ignored for decades in South African
literature. Worse still, the experience of exiles was hardly different from the sense of
marginality which informed the initial removal from home. Therefore, whether as writers,
or intellectuals, or ordinary individuals, or groups caught in the vortex of exile, their
experience could not have been different from what Homi Bhabha (2006:198) identifies
as the fate of exiles: